February 15, 2011

Eye Tracking

This is amazing. This video is a part of the movie "There Will Be Blood" They used an inferred eye tracking program to track what people looked at while watching the movie. Each green dot is from different people's eyes. They used 11 adults, the bigger the dot the longer they look in the same place.

The movie has great cinematography Paul Thomas Anderson really knows how to lead the audience's eye. When we start the shot we're really in the dark and the eye will jump to any light source at all, they even jump to where we think the face will be before we see the face. Notice how the eye movements jump from person to person as they talk, and as they don't talk. Notice after one actor asks a question we jump to who he asked the question to before they respond, even before they finish the question. People can figure things out pretty quickly, what they want is to see the response. Then when we cut from inside to outside, it feels like a seamless cut becouse the perspective doesn't change, but the eye is drawn to the vanishing lines of the train track. As soon as the car starts moving into the shot the eye jumps to to the first thing that is moving. These are all my quick observations, Im' sure there's a lot more of them. Really great stuff, nice to see: